More science and digital initiatives stories:

Searching all media

A long-held ambition was realised this
year: to make details of the richness
and diversity of the Library’s collections accessible in the single sweep of a search term.

The search box is now centre-stage on
our home page: a word entered in it –
for example, ‘badger’ – will take you to
image files, from medieval manuscripts to
Victorian lithographs; sound files of badger
calls and oral histories of badger baiting;
and relevant books from holdings of some
13 million. The results also cite the latest
research papers on badger tuberculosis
and public reactions to culling proposals,
from among 20 million articles on our
British Library Direct service.